Marrying Him Was Political. Sponsoring His Visa Is for Love.

Our romantic, pragmatic green-card wedding day.

By Jessa Crispin

Ms. Crispin is a writer and critic.

Nov. 24, 2018

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CreditCreditTomi Um

We were sitting in a dive bar in Kansas City, Mo., with two whiskey sodas, and the man I had met only 10 days before said he had an important question to ask me. The last “important question” was, “What is your relationship to potato chips?” which he’d asked while gesturing to the many bags of various flavors piled in my pantry (the answer, of course, being, “Potato chips are my soul mate”), so it wasn’t as if I was expecting anything electric to come out of his mouth.

I looked at him, and he said with a steady gaze, “Would you marry me?”

I felt the strangest thing. Not joy, not shock, not fear. I felt calm. Calm, as everyone who knows me is aware, is a rare feeling for me. But first I had to make sure he wasn’t making fun of me.

“Is that a hypothetical or a practical question?”

“Both,” he said.

“Then yes.”

We ordered another round, set a date for a courthouse wedding four days later and immediately begin to text our friends. “What? Why?” was a typical response. “Are you sure?” I ignored them.

Drunk on whiskey and other stuff, we stumbled out of the bar. As I stood on the curb to hail a cab, he ran to the drugstore next door. “Just need to get something.” He came back out, his arms full of potato chips, bags of every flavor they had on the shelves.

But marriage is not about love. It is about politics. All of my adult life I have argued for the abolition of marriage, because marriage is a series of rights unfairly distributed to men and women who have found love or who have deluded themselves into thinking they have found love. If romantic love is its own reward, as every Hollywood film and novel in the “women’s fiction” section at the bookstore would have us believe, then why pile on tax breaks, hospital visitation, health insurance, immigration assistance and all of the rest of it? Having a successful love life should not have a determination on whether you live or die.

One American friend of mine is chronically ill but had the very good fortune to fall in love with a German man, gaining access to a nationalized health service and an expedited immigration process. Being away from the broken American health care system and the even more broken Medicaid insurance system for the poor and disadvantaged, my friend has renewed health, more energy, a higher income that comes with a larger capacity for work, and optimism for the first time in years.

An Indian friend of ours had the very good fortune to fall in love with an American woman, giving him access to an expedited immigration process and a more easily attainable work visa, allowing him to keep his job at an institution that despite pulling in millions of dollars a year in grants and donations decided that sponsoring its immigrant workers’ visas wasn’t worth the investment of time and money.

And then the wife of my husband’s friend — she had the misfortune of falling deeply in love with a Colombian man, with his own already shaky migration status, and the United States government announced it would not be approving her application for an extension of her residency visa and gave her 30 days to pack up the four years of life she had built in New York City. She had no guarantee that she would be able to return or that the two of them could find a place where both of them would have the ability to work and live.

What does that do to love, when one realizes how politically convenient or inconvenient this partnership will be for you? Holding my partner’s hand at the immigration lawyer’s office, I wanted so much to give this to him: a stabilized future, the ability to live and work where he wanted, a larger canvas for his ambitions. And yet something in me started to draw back at that moment. A whirlwind adventure of love and romance started to look like a strategic seduction.

“He might fear that I might be mercenary.”

I keep thinking of that line, spoken by Morris Townsend in the movie “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s “Washington Square.” In the story, Catherine Sloper is a woman with no charm, no grace. Her manner of dress runs toward the tacky and the shiny, and she has that haunted look of a person who has been told love will find her, and when it doesn’t, rather than sitting and calmly waiting for that day, she frantically runs from place to place, asking every man she comes across, “Are you the one who has come to save me?”

What she does have is $30,000 a year, a sizable inheritance. Morris Townsend has no career, nor any real inclination to work, but he does have a taste for the finer things in life, and in the film, Montgomery Clift’s face. He knows it looks bad, the penniless suitor chasing after an heiress. He doesn’t help his case by anticipating the father’s suspicions, and vocalizing them: “He might fear that I might be mercenary.”

Well, how could people not, with the gangly girl whom he professes to ardently adore standing before them. But she has no hesitation, not even a moment of doubt. This is the love she was promised, and she will cling to it like the life raft that it so clearly is, no matter what her father tries to do to break them apart.

James does two things. The first is that he allows Morris’s intentions to be ambiguous. He is neither rogue nor saint. Catherine, despite all of her failings, has a sharp wit and a kind heart. It is not her fault that women are not generally pursued for their sharp wit and kind hearts, but he allows the reader to love her and hope that Morris has an unconventional taste in women.

But the other thing James does is suggest that maybe it doesn’t matter whether Morris loves her or not, as long as he takes care of her. Is it a tragedy to make love a transaction? To say I will stand by your side as long as I get tailored suits from Paris and sherry imported from Spain and cigars from Cuba? Or health insurance for my chronic illness? Or a residency visa?

I, too, have around $30,000 a year, although a hundred years after James wrote his book, that is not the prize it once was. And also like Catherine, I have all the grace of an elephant in high heels, my knees decorated with an ever shifting display of bruises from my stumbling into things, and my manner of dress also runs toward the tacky and the shiny. I have my assets, an intelligence and an accomplished body of work, but women in our culture are not pursued for intelligence and accomplished bodies of work, certainly not by considerably younger men.

As such, my lover resembles Morris, in his effortless charm, his handsome face and his desire for something I could easily provide. Unlike Catherine, I am aware of my failings and how on paper this match seems so unlikely. I am also attuned to the doubt that runs through our social circle, with my friends making cracks about our green-card marriage, and the confusion that comes into his friends’ faces when they are introduced to me.

If this were solely practical, a bloodless transaction for a much-needed visa, or if it were solely romantic, just two people so taken with each other the concerns of the world mattered not to us, this marriage would make more sense to me. It is the mix that knots my stomach at times and turns me cold.

Marrying him was a political act, and sponsoring him for a visa is a devotional act. We are amassing a file to prove that this relationship is real and not a transaction. The American government gives you a list of things it will be looking for to prove the legitimacy of your love. Under the heading “shared property,” you can have a lease with both of your names on it, a joint bank account, jointly filed taxes. Under the heading of social presence, it wants to see pictures of you on vacation together, party invitations addressed to both of you, social media posts featuring you as a couple.

Our lawyer gave us a list of sample questions to prepare for the inevitable interview with a bureaucrat who will officially declare whether or not our love is real: “What color is your partner’s toothbrush?” “What is your partner’s favorite food?” “What are the names of your partner’s extended family members?”

The file wears on both of us. Pictures we take of each other are both for us and for the government. When I say, “What’s your niece’s name again?” I’m asking it to set it in my brain for the eventual quiz, not out of curiosity.

But the government’s file is different from the one in my head. It’s not going to sway any official to learn how I felt when I discovered that for weeks my lover had been, without telling me, going on Twitter, searching for my name and liking every nice thing said about my writing there. Or how frequently he grabs for my hand when we are walking down the street. Or his urgent kiss when the judge declared us wed.

Once, as we sat going through the endless pile of paperwork, he asked me, “Did you ever think this marriage was a scam?”

“Yes,” I said, although the look on his face made me wish I had lied.

Jessa Crispin is the author of “Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.”